But his grandmother’s voice was equally firm. “We shall see about that,” she said, and with a haughty toss of her head, she turned, and left the room.
Drake watched her go, the long purple train of her gown trailing behind her with a gentle swishing sound. He couldn’t say he loved his grandmother, but he respected her. She was, in many ways, as stubborn as he was.
But she didn’t have any idea what she was up against. No idea at all.
And Drake, who had a very good idea, knew fighting it was futile. He gave the fish pond one final glance—the swans had disappeared; hopefully, they’d choked to death on his cigar, the pair of them—then shrugged his shoulders. It was time to get back to his guests.
And his fiancee.
Chapter Four
“Oh, no,” said the man at Payton’s right upon discovering that his seat was beside hers.
“Not you,” said the man at her left.
Payton hissed, “I won’t. I won’t sit between you. It’s not fair!”
“You think it’s unfair?” Hudson looked around the dining room furiously. “There’s scads of attractive, eligible ladies at this function, and we have to sit by our little sister? How do you think we feel?”
“I don’t know what Drake could have been thinking.” Raleigh glared daggers at his host. “There must be some kind of mistake. Quick, let’s see if we can trade—”
But chairs were already being pulled out all around them. It was too late to trade places. Besides, Lady Bisson, Drake’s grandmother, seated on Hudson’s right, had already given them a strange look as her grandson had helped her into her chair. While the look might have been directed solely at Payton, who had already thoroughly embarrassed herself by admitting—albeit unknowingly—to the groom’s family that she didn’t care for his bride, the two brothers thought it was meant for them, and they quickly took their seats.
The Dixons—at least the younger ones—were, it appeared, stuck with each other.
“Well,” Hudson muttered, unfolding his napkin. “This is a fine how-d’you-do.”
“Really,” Raleigh agreed. “Try not to embarrass us this time, Pay.”
“Me?” Payton scowled at them. “What did I ever do?”
“Oh, let me see,” Hudson said, feigning thoughtful contemplation. “There was the time you drove the fork into the waiter’s hand in Canton.”
“He deserved it,” Payton asserted. “I saw him try to lift Drake’s wallet. Besides, it wasn’t a fork, it was a chopstick.”
“What about that year you refused to eat anything yellow?”
“Need I remind you that I was eight years old at the time?”
“We were in the West Indies, for pity’s sake. All the food there was yellow.”
“Well, you needn’t worry. I shan’t embarrass you tonight. I’m sure that’s why Drake seated me between you.” She couldn’t help leveling a bitter glare at their host, who was chatting amiably with his grandmother. “He doesn’t trust me not to stab his footmen with my fish fork.”
“Right,” Raleigh agreed with a smirk. “Any more than he trusts us around those cousins of his, eh, Hud?”
Hudson chuckled lasciviously, and the two men exchanged leers over the top of Payton’s head.
Payton rolled her eyes. She didn’t blame Drake, she supposed, for forcing her to sit between her brothers, who were such incorrigible bachelors. Especially since so many of his pretty young cousins were in the room. But she wondered if that was really the reason he’d sat her there. More likely, it was because Connor Drake considered her a child, in need of adult supervision, and probably expected her to stand up and throw things during the course of the meal. If there’d been a separate table for his underage guests, Payton had no doubt she’d have found herself seated there.
Well, and why shouldn’t he consider her a child? Every time he saw her she was engaged in some kind of buffoonery, like that wrestling match earlier with her brothers. And now she had that embarrassing gaffe with his grandmother to worry about. How was she to have known that the old lady was related to him? Of course, she ought to have guessed by all the questions—not to mention the old woman’s piercing gaze, an exact replica of Drake’s.
Lord, of course he thought her a child! She was forever acting like one. She twisted disgustedly in her chair. Georgiana could put her in all the corsets she wanted: the truth was, no one would ever consider Payton an adult woman, with an adult woman’s body, and an adult woman’s heart.
Payton slumped defeatedly in her seat—or as much as she could slump, with those stays pointing so uncomfortably into her ribs—and turned her attention to the head of the table, where Drake had risen, a glass of champagne in his hand. She sat only a few place settings away from him, since her brothers, as groomsmen, were part of the bridal party. She could see that the harsh lines that had been in his face earlier in the evening were still there. In fact, now that the sun had finally set, and the room was lit by candle flame, those lines were thrown into harsher relief than ever. Whatever was eating away at him, it wasn’t getting any better as the evening progressed. Well, it wouldn’t, she supposed. Not until tomorrow. Every man was nervous before his wedding day. She remembered that Ross had retched repeatedly the night before his wedding to Georgiana.
But then again, that might have been a result of all the rum.
“If I could have your attention, please,” Drake said, in his deep voice, the one that reminded Payton of velvet sky on a summer evening—not unlike this one. The fifty or so people seated at the long dining table quieted, and turned in their seats to look expectantly at their host. He managed a smile, though it wasn’t a very convincing one. Payton had seen Drake converse with hostile island natives with more ease.
Well, she supposed, it had to be nerve-wracking: seated on either side of him was his bride-to-be and his grandmother, each woman gazing up at him raptly, Miss Whitby with a tiny smile that, to Payton’s admittedly jealous eye, was triumphant, Lady Bisson with a frown that, as far as Payton could tell, was directed more at the footmen behind her grandson, whom she didn’t seem to feel were pouring the champagne into the guests’ glasses quickly enough.
“I’d like to thank all of you,” Drake went on, “for joining me on this very special occasion. I know that some of you have come a very long way, indeed—”
“Aye,” Payton’s father burst out, unable to contain his good humor. “All the way from London!” He elbowed Georgiana, who had the misfortune to be seated on his right. “All the way from London, right, my dear?”
“Indeed,” Drake said solemnly. “Some of you from as far away as London. And Becky—Miss Whitby, I mean”—the bride blushed prettily at this blunder—“and I would like to thank you heartily for coming, and helping us to celebrate what will, I hope, be a very happy day.”
“Here, here,” Raleigh cried, raising his glass.
“Cheers,” Hudson bellowed.
Everyone raised their glasses and tipped them in the direction of the bride and groom. Even Payton toasted them, and then wondered if she was going to burn in hell for uttering a swift and silent prayer as she did so that Miss Whitby might perish in her sleep. Quickly and painlessly, of course.
Was it really so very wicked of her to wish something like that? Yes, she supposed it was. She offered up another prayer, this one asking the Lord’s forgiveness.
When she set her glass down, she wasn’t the only one who was surprised to see that she’d swallowed the whole of its contents.
“Heave to, Pay,” Raleigh cried. “You’ll be tipsy before the soup comes.”
“She’s not the only one,” Hudson said, poking her rather hard in the ribs. “Look at Drake.”
Their host had swallowed everything in his own glass, as well. Smiling—this time more genuinely—he took his seat again with a shrug.
“Well,” he said. “I suppose that means Payton and I will just have to have some more.”
His footmen seemed only too happy to oblige. The champa
gne flowed very freely, indeed. According to the menu, which Payton found beside her plate, tied up with a piece of pink silk ribbon—a pink silk, she noticed, that matched the color of the rosettes in the bride’s hair—they were to expect a veritable feast, including lobster tails and lamb cutlets, two of her favorite foods, with a different wine or liqueur for each course.
Still, she could not enjoy the talents of Daring Park’s exemplary cook, or share in the high spirits—both literally as well as figuratively—of the rest of the table. She hated herself for this. Why—and when—had she developed this insufferable weakness for Connor Drake? She could not put her finger on the exact date it had occurred, but it was as clear as the bubbles in the champagne that was continuously poured into her glass:
She was in love with this man. And he was marrying someone else.
Not only marrying someone else, but marrying someone else without ever once having cast her, the Honorable Miss Payton Dixon, a second glance!
Oh, he’d shown her a gentlemanly civility once or twice: that summer night she’d been stretched out on the deck of the Virago, watching a spectacular display of falling stars. No sooner had she spied one flashing white streak in the sky than there’d been another. When everyone else, their necks stiff, had declared their intention of retiring, Payton alone had remained on deck, insisting on watching the dazzling light show until it ended, or the sun rose, whichever came first. And Drake, who’d gone into the foc’sle with the others, had suddenly reappeared, a blanket and a pillow in either hand.
Payton had thought, for one dizzying, glorious moment, that he intended to join her on deck. But he soon dashed those hopes, and awakened a different kind, when he’d fussed over her, insisting she keep warm, and use the pillow as a cushion for her head against the hard wood of the quarterdeck.
And Payton had been as touched as if he really had joined her, for it was his blanket he’d brought her, and his pillow. They smelled of him, that odor that was peculiarly Drake’s, of salt air and fresh laundry and clean man, an odor she’d gotten used to in the years they’d traveled together in what was, at times, very close quarters, indeed. She had lain on the deck, wrapped in his blanket, her head on his pillow, and marveled at his sacrifice, since it meant he was sleeping on his hard pallet in the forecastle with no such comforts.
Of course, her brothers pointed out the following day that he’d been far too drunk to miss them. They’d all been imbibing heavily that night, Drake heaviest of all, and if, in a moment of morbid sentimentality, he’d loaned Payton his blanket and pillow, it was only because he’d been too intoxicated to know what he was doing. Drake had very nobly denied the veracity of this, but to Payton, it hadn’t mattered: even if he’d been drunk, he’d still thought of her. Drunk or sober, to be thought of by Connor Drake at all was no very small thing.
There’d been other examples of Drake’s superiority to all the men of Payton’s acquaintance, of course. That time they’d been involved in that brawl in Havana, and a pirate had seized Payton about the waist, and tried to toss her into the bay: Drake had shot him through the eyes with what Payton liked to think was almost loverlike savagery. And, more intimately, an evening when Drake had been recuperating from a disastrous love affair with a native girl—she’d turned out to be married; granted her husband had several other wives in addition to her, but their union was still legal—and had been drunkenly bemoaning the fact that he was never going to find a wife, and Payton had volunteered her services, if by the time she was of marriageable age, he still hadn’t found anyone. Despite her brothers’ guffaws at the idea of Payton marrying anyone—and their speculations as to Payton’s abilities as wife and mother—Drake had quite gallantly kissed her hand, and told her he had every intention of taking her up on her offer.
That had been, by Payton’s reckoning, only four years ago. But here she was, of eminently marriageable age, and no proposal was forthcoming.
Because, of course, he’d found a bride so much more appealing.
Looking across the table at Miss Whitby, Payton had no choice but to admit it to herself: penniless or not, Becky Whitby would make any man an enviable wife. She was everything a woman ought to be: soft, feminine, sweet, gentle. Miss Whitby never cursed, or found lice in her hair, or freckled. Miss Whitby never roughhoused, or stabbed waiters with chopsticks, or declared to anyone’s grandmother that she hated their grandchild’s intended spouse. Miss Whitby, to Payton’s certain knowledge, did not even know how to load a derringer, let alone fire one.
Miss Whitby was perfect.
Which was why Payton took the silk ribbon from her menu and slipped it, still in its bow, over her hand, to wear about her wrist. In this way, she hoped to bear a constant reminder to herself that what she wanted was most definitely out of her reach. Captain Connor Drake had never considered her anything more than the little sister of his three best friends. He had never thought of her as a woman, or even as female. He was marrying Miss Becky Whitby, and that was all there was to it.
And the sooner she got that through her thick little head, the better.
The ribbon helped. She looked at it every time one of her brothers rose to make a toast to the happy couple, toasts that became progressively bawdier as the night wore on. She looked at it every time Miss Whitby tittered and hid her face behind her fan. She looked at it every time Drake reached for his glass just as Miss Whitby reached for hers, and their fingers touched, and Drake, looking every hour more like a man approaching his execution than the happiest day of his life, murmured, “I beg your pardon.”
She looked at it so much, in fact, that finally Hudson noticed, and said, “Gad, Payton, are you so hard up for baubles you’ve got to start wearin’ the party favors?”
Fortunately, no one heard him. It was a gay and boisterous party, with everyone talking at once. Payton, from years of long practice, was able to separate Drake’s voice from all the others. He was speaking to his fiancée and grandmother. Payton would have supposed that, since these two ladies who shared such important places in Drake’s life had just met, their conversation would necessarily revolve around getting to know one another: Lady Bisson might perhaps share an embarrassing incident from her grandson’s childhood. Miss Whitby would then relate some equally embarrassing incident from her own. In this way, Payton knew, from having watched her brother around his wife’s family, in-laws got to know one another.
But that was not the case here at all. Lady Bisson was absolutely silent, opening her mouth only to spoon soup into it now and then. And Miss Whitby was just sitting there, hanging on Drake’s every word.
And what was Drake, the night before the most important day—or what ought to have been, at least—in his life, discussing? Not his plans for their future. He wasn’t telling his grandmother how they met (he couldn’t know that Payton had, albeit unknowingly, already performed that function). No. He was telling them both about his last voyage to the Sandwich Islands. Payton could hardly believe it. He was going on and on about the island natives, as if they were the most interesting topic in the world, and he was doing it in a strange voice Payton had never heard him use before, a voice completely devoid of whatever it was that made Drake’s voice so distinctive, so that, whenever he was talking, she could easily trace his whereabouts on any ship, no matter what its size.
Payton knew a thing or two about the natives of the Sandwich Islands, and in her opinion, while they were quite interesting, they did not bear discussing just then, when so many other, more important topics might be explored—like whether or not the groom intended to give up his career upon the sea now that he’d inherited a baronetcy, or just why, precisely, he’d decided to marry this woman he hardly knew anything about, beyond the fact that she had a pretty face and a remarkably bouncy bosom.
Payton became so incensed as she listened to Drake expound on what he called the charming rituals of the Sandwich Island natives, that she finally interrupted with the tart suggestion that he tell his grandmother all about the ch
arming Sandwich Island ritual of imprisoning any woman suspected of having performed a licentious act, and then forcing her, by night, to service the local military officers. Wasn’t that charming?
That shut Drake up. Unfortunately, it also shut up everyone else within earshot. Payton, who’d really only said it to force Drake into using his normal speaking voice, and not that detached, polite tone she hardly recognized as belonging to him, blinked a few times. Drake sat frozen, a forkful of lobster halfway to his mouth. Lady Bisson leaned past Hudson to peer at Payton through her lorgnette, as if she were an interesting scientific specimen. Georgiana had sunk her face into her hands, and Ross, Raleigh, and Hudson were looking everywhere but in Payton’s direction. Only her father and the odious Miss Whitby looked at all pleased—Sir Henry because he was always proud of his little girl, no matter what came out of her mouth, and Miss Whitby because Payton had made such a perfect fool of herself … again.
But Payton wasn’t about to back down. Dabbing the corner of her mouth with her napkin, she said primly, “Well, it’s true.” She sent a reproving look at Drake. “You shouldn’t lead people to believe it’s all bare breasts and waterfalls.”
The silence that followed this piece of information lasted maybe a heartbeat, but to Payton, it seemed like a decade. Then Hudson, who could stand it no longer, let out a terrific whoop of laughter, which Raleigh echoed with one of his own. Soon, everyone—with the exception, Payton noted, of Lady Bisson and Miss Whitby—was laughing.
Including Drake.
Only Payton hadn’t meant to be funny.
Still, it was very hard not to laugh when so many people around her were doing so.
Payton tried not to smile, but she couldn’t help it—especially not after Hudson pounded her on the back, causing her to drop a large portion of lamb cutlet into her lap.
Well, she’d been looking for an excuse to leave the table, anyway. One of the many disadvantages of wearing a corset, she soon realized, was that it did press rather insistently against the bladder. She felt the need for a moment to herself, and not just to wipe the gravy off her skirt.
An Improper Proposal Page 6
